Understanding Bone Marrow Transplant

A complete primer on bone marrow transplant.

What is Bone Marrow

Bones are not solid, but instead are made up both compact and spongy structure. The compact bone gives strength, while the spongy bone contains the marrow.

The outer, weight-bearing area is hard, compact, and calcium-based. The inner region is a lattice-work of fibrous bone known as cancellous tissue.

Bone marrow is a soft fatty tissue that fills the cavities of certain bones – such as the sternum (middle of the chest), pelvis (hip bone), and femur (thigh bone). It fills the shafts of the long bones, the trabeculae (spaces within cancellous tissue), and extends into the bony canals that hold the blood vessels.

Our skull, sternum, ribs, pelvis, and femur bones all contain bone marrow, but other smaller bones do not contain the marrow. Inside this special tissue, stems cells reside. Stem cells are large "primitive" undifferentiated cells.
While they are undifferentiated, the stem cells wait until unhealthy, weakened, or damaged cells need to be replaced. These stem cells transform themselves into white and red blood cells and platelets, essential for immunity and circulation. This process is directed by subtle chemical cues that vary according to location and conditions in the body.

Any of the blood cells that comprise the bloodstream within the arteries and veins are born from stem cells and mature within the bone marrow.

Importance of Bone Marrow

Bone marrow is a critical part of the body because it is the body's main blood cell "factory."

Stem cells within the bone marrow continuously divide to form new cells. Some of the new cells remain unchanged as stem cells and have a lifelong capacity for self-renewal. These cells are called pluripotent cells. These are capable of transforming themselves into all the tissues that compose a living being, except the placenta.

Telomeres and Telomerase: Delaying Aging and Preventing Cancer

Telomeres are located at the end of your chromosomes, the biggest building blocks of your DNA. The length of telomeres governs the aging process. And inhibiting the Telomerase, the enzyme responsible for telomere maintenance, provides a means to combat cancer.

What Are Telomeres?

Chromosomes are twisted, double-stranded molecules of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and protein. Within the nucleus of the cells of higher animals, the chromosomes are packed into a compact form, and contain the genetic material that form the basis of heredity. Chromosomes are an essential unit for cellular division and must be replicated, divided, and passed successfully to their daughter cells so as to ensure the genetic diversity and survival of their progeny.

At the ends of the chromosomes are stretches of DNA called telomeres. They contain small repetitive DNA sequences and are non coding DNA sequences. Thus, the telomeres do not carry any information to be passed on to the next generation.

Source: http://www.rawfoodsbible.com/

Importance of Telomeres

Telomeres allow cells to divide without losing genes. Cell division is needed so we can grow new skin, blood, bone and other cells when needed.

Telomeres have been compared with the plastic tips on shoelaces because they prevent chromosome ends from fraying and sticking to each other, which would scramble an organism's genetic information.

The telomeres protect chromosome ends from being mistaken for broken pieces of DNA. Because broken DNA is dangerous, a cell senses and repairs chromosome damage by fusing together the chromosome ends. This would degrade the cell's genetic blueprint, making the cell malfunction, become cancerous or die.

What Factors Trigger a Heart Attack?

Your arteries are blocked by plaques, and you are quite at risk for a heart attack. It could happen any day, but what are the factors that specifically trigger it on a particular day?

Heart attacks occur when a piece of plaque lining an artery wall ruptures and blocks the flow of blood to the heart. Heart attacks, strokes, and cardiac arrests seem like they come out of the blue, but most don’t. So what makes one happen at a particular time? A trigger, reports the July 2007 issue of the Harvard Heart Letter.

Researchers created a list of triggers by asking patients and their care givers what they were doing shortly before they had an attack and published the study in the journal Stroke.

* Emotional Stress

* Acute Infections

* Over-eating

* Physical Stress

* Coffee/Alcohol/Cocaine consumption

* Sex

* Lack of Sleep

* Exposure to Traffic Smoke

For more details, read: Heart Attack Triggers

Is The Bad Cholesterol Really Bad?

Low Density Lipoproteins (LDL) are called "bad cholesterol" and have been charged with forming plaques along the arterial walls and lead to Coronary Heart Disease and Atherosclerosis. But now the recent study at Texas says LDL plays an important role in muscle-building and in over-all health.

We had them coming. And it is not the first time scientists reversed earlier theories or given advice that ran counter to an earlier advice.

LDL is an evil, they had declared, that caused all of humanity's Coronary Artery Disease (CAD) and Atherosclerosis (Atheroma refers to deposits of lipid-containing plaques on the innermost layer of the wall of an artery, and sclerosis refers to subsequent hardening of the tissues).

Now for the latest report that LDL, the "bad" cholesterol is not bad after all.

A team of Texas A&M researchers have reported in the latest issue of Journal of Gerontology that LDL cholesterol may actually play an important role in overall health.

What is LDL? Since triglycerides and cholesterol are insoluble in circulating plasma (the fluid component of our blood), they must be packaged with proteins to make them dissolve in plasma and be transported to all the areas in the body. This package of cholesterol/triglycerides plus a protein is called a lipoprotein (lipid or fat plus protein).

The researchers found that out of the people who participated in fairly vigorous activity, the people who gained the most muscle mass were the ones with highest LDL cholesterol levels. The researchers said that this finding illustrates that a certain amount of "bad" cholesterol is needed to build muscle during resistance training.

Steve Riechman, the Head researcher in the Department of Health and Kinesiology, says that building muscle mass is very important to arrest a condition called sarcopenia, which is muscle loss due to aging. It is found that muscle is usually lost at a rate of 5 percent per decade after the age of 40, and after the age of 60, moderate to severe sarcopenia sets in 65 percent of all men and about 30 percent of all women. Riechman says that LDL serves as a signal that warns of other underlying factors that are more dangerous, such as smoking, improper diet, lack of exercise, etc. Simply eliminating cholesterol can be dangerous, he opines.

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How Insulin Works: Part 2

By Dr. VNS Retired Professor of Biochemistry, with a wide variety of interests, including reading and writing. Interests include cricket and wildlife. He writes at Health Today and Tomorrow and Health is Wealth

The cells utilize glucose as a fuel molecule and therefore, glucose must first enter the cells. As mentioned earlier, some of the cells do not require insulin for entry of glucose into the cells while others do. Whatever be the mechanism involved, glucose must be locked up when it is inside the cells. This will prevent the leakage of glucose back into the circulation. This fixing of glucose is achieved through a chemical transformation.


Glucose——————-> Glucose-6-phosphate

This reaction is catalysed by an enzyme called hexokinase which is present in the cytoplasm of the cells. The phosphorylated form of glucose cannot get out of the cells.

Insulin and glucose utilization

The entry of glucose into the cells has a specific function and that is to serve as a fuel molecule, thereby, paving the way for energy conservation. Insulin promotes not only the entry of glucose into the cells, but also facilitates its oxidation within the cells. Insulin increases the activity of hexokinase within the cells. How is this happening?

Hexokinase induction

Let us consider the lifting up of a heavy object. This can be done by four people working together or, it can be done by one individual who becomes a super human being with exceptional strength and stamina. In a similar fashion, the activity of an enzyme can increase in two ways.

• The enzyme can assume a different form (conformation or, structure) and become more active.
• The number of molecules of the enzyme may increase, again resulting in increase in the enzyme activity.
  

The latter process is called induction and is achieved by activating the gene responsible for the formation of the enzyme. Insulin action leads to the activation of the gene responsible for the formation of hexokinase. Thus, there is an increase in the number of hexokinase molecules. This results in the increased oxidation of glucose within the cells.